Observations on politics, news, culture and humor

The Despots of Urbanism

It’s been a few months now since Yuri Luzhkov, the gay-bashing, Ukraine-baiting, environment-hating corrupt loser who had been Moscow’s mayor since 1992, was sacked. He was quickly replaced by an undistinguished Kremlin apparatchik called Sergei Sobyanin. Sobyanin took one of his first independent strides last week when he decided to close down and cart off a huge number of Moscow’s small galaxy of street kiosks. Apparently, he visited a metro station and decided that kiosks were blocking his view of a monument. So with the stroke of a pen, this functionary of the supposedly democratic Russian state took the sort of anti-human authoritarian destructive action his forebears have been taking for centuries, just that they were more open in their intentions as they styled themselves monarchists and communists.

It was a happy day for me when I read just a few days later that some of the kiosk owners had protested and upon further examination, it turned out that Sobyanin’s suggested interpretation of the law was far too broad, so the kiosks will be allowed to return.

This happiness was short-lived, though. What of the vendors who had their kiosks torn down and carted off? What of the vendors who lost a few days of prime business as the holidays approach? And what of the reality that it will be incredibly easy for the apparatchiki running Moscow to draft a new, properly extensive version of this law and ban the kiosks again in a matter of days or months?

These kiosks were causing no one any harm. They were on public property. As our reader Joe pointed out in response to the Fred Phelps controversy, this is one of the reasons why it would be nice to get rid of public property–so that private property owners would have full control over what and who to allow to use their land. But in the conditions in which we live, these people were just trying to eke out a living and the state came in and crushed them just so they could have a better view of a monument.

And if you think this is a Russian phenomenon, I would just like to ask you to explain eminent domain to me.